


Aerilon Girls Are Easy

by CatsOnMars



Category: Battlestar Galactica, Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon, F/M, First Time, Flashbacks, Holy baggage batman, Pre-Canon, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-19
Updated: 2012-01-19
Packaged: 2017-10-29 18:50:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/323003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CatsOnMars/pseuds/CatsOnMars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Without a war to bring them back together, it takes a lot for Kara and Lee to be able to forgive each other. And themselves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Aerilon Girls Are Easy

**Author's Note:**

> This was started long before "Daybreak" so it's a totally-not-canon AU even including the timeframe before the war. My flashbacks are not consistent with the canon flashbacks, etc.

Kara is stuck in the slow, sporadically gushing flow of Delphi traffic on a weekend afternoon, her elbow hanging out the open window of her monstrous four-by-four, when she sees the faded old poster for a movie called _Black Swan_ in the window of a little movie rental store on a corner and then looks quickly away before she can remember.

The only time she has spoken to Lee Adama since the day of the funeral was more than four months ago. He was on the _Galactica_ for the decommissioning, and she was in a brig cell.

It made it easier than it could have been to have the bars in between them. Otherwise she might not have been able to face him.

 

At some point that Lee couldn't identify his life has become strained at the edges, wanting to somehow break out of the confining and orderly shape it's been neatly folded into. Wake up at this time, report for briefings, call this person, perform this mission, wash his uniform. It is all so calculated and safe.

Every once in a while, late in the night after he's had a few or even first thing in the morning when he really doesn't feel like getting up for the same old shit, this gutsy little voice creeps out from the dark inside him and says do it. _Do it do it do it do it_. Until one day another pilot asks him if he's still thinking about applying for duty on base in Picon and without thinking about what he's saying he responds, "Actually I've decided I'm quitting the service."

His friend is so taken aback he thinks he's kidding at first. After Lee attempts to explain, he has to ask what made him get into the military anyway if it was never what he really wanted.

"I don't know," Lee says. "I guess with the kind of family I came from, it was just what was easy."

And this is a start. But he still isn't sure if he has completely figured out what _it_ is.

 

She wakes up in the morning, showers and gets dressed and brushes her teeth with the sticking thought: _I think I am finished mourning him._ This is how she must define her life, the stage of it. Somewhere in the back of her head she keeps track of the time since she last got laid. She lets her hair start growing out a little.

It's been over two years now, but it is still inevitable that when she thinks of being touched at all she thinks of Zak because he was her last serious one. It is sometimes unbearable how painful this can be, shocking how much she can still want him when even the most primal and meaningless urge to feel another body brings her to remember all over again, but there is a part of her that doesn't want this to ever change. It is a way of holding onto him.

There is a certain reluctance to let go in grief itself, and something about acceptance and moving on that senselessly feels cold and inhuman. When the pain of separation is the only remaining connection to someone, it can be desperately clung to despite the misery attached to it. When she thinks about it as much as Kara ever thinks about these things, the idea of healing and progressing forward still seems somehow ridiculous to her. Because her love for him hurts so much now it is holding her back, she must sever herself from him and he must be forgotten because this is the way it works.

But what happens to him? He goes down, into the dark, buried forever, frozen in time, while the girl he was going to marry stays here and her hair looks different now and she no longer belongs to him. And she will be fine without him because that's how it works. And his brother...

This isn't the way it should be. She can't stop thinking that. Maybe for others who experience loss like this, yes. But she cannot help feeling like she has never suffered enough. And so she goes on with the constant hunger and desire, the inclination to have and to be again, that sits familiarly inside her and aches. With the kind of responsibility she must live with, she figures getting used to this is the most that can be expected of her.

 _I think I am finished mourning him. Whatever the frak that's supposed to mean._

 

Lee and Kara never ended up meeting during their years at the academy, but their social circles were always connected through several people. Including one Ken Cage who knew pretty much everybody and sends Lee an invitation to his wedding that he wasn't exactly expecting.

He knows Ken probably wouldn't even have thought to send him one if he hadn't happened to run into him a few months ago at a spaceport and mention during the twenty minutes they were shooting the shit that he was about to get married, and at first Lee doesn't think he'll bother going. But after he can't seem to stop thinking about it for a while, he gives up and decides to go.

Just like he predicted, the wedding is almost more of a class reunion, crawling with familiar faces from his old days. But it's not everyone. Even though he literally can't remember anyone he _knew_ at the academy who he doesn't see somewhere in the room at the reception, he cannot get rid of the strong sense that someone is missing.

Then he actually hears someone say it at a nearby table where everyone is laughing over something. "...He has _never_ let that go, but I swear to gods I didn't cheat. Kara Thrace was the one who knew how to frakking _rob_ you at cards, but I wouldn't even know how."

It's too late to tune it out and Lee hears someone saying to her with a laugh, "Starbuck didn't cheat, you were just bad."

"Oh _please_ , that girl was paying rent with what she won at cards. _When_ she paid her rent, gods bless her..."

Lee traces lines through the condensation on his glass, suddenly feeling amazingly foolish for being here.

 

He and Kara once came up with a code word they could use to cheat while playing a certain card game that involved teams. If one of them made any reference in conversation to Liz Teller of the Picon Panthers, it meant _I've got a good hand so don't draw from me anymore._

The next time he had to call her, she picked up and answered, "Sing out," and instead of saying "Hi, it's me" he just identified himself by saying, "Teller."

After that it somehow evolved into an all-purpose code word and sort of an inside joke between the two of them. If one of them muttered it to the other before leaving for the bathroom for a minute while they were in a bar, it meant _Don't let Zak have any more alcohol or you get to carry him inside when we take him home._

Once when the three of them went to a concert together, Kara was almost too exhausted to stay on her feet as they were slowly making their way out with the rest of the congested crowd after the show. At one point she sighed heavily and started to lean back against Lee without realizing it was him and not Zak standing directly behind her. He held her waist to steady her but then instantly drew his hands back away and said softly, "Teller," sounding just slightly uncomfortable, so that she blinked and stood up straight again. _It's me._

 _Careful._

 

Kara gets a wedding invitation from an old friend named Ken Cage. An extra note written by him is added in pen on the inside along with a smiley face: _"Only if you think you can behave yourself."_

She smirks and mutters, "Asshole," suddenly remembering fondly several of her less polite moments from when she knew Ken that he is probably indirectly referring to. Then she thinks about who else he might be inviting if he thought to put her on the list.

Her smile slowly falls as she stands still for a while. Then she unhesitantly puts it down with the pile of junk mail and throws it away.

 

Three months later, Kara is taking her second leave since transferring to the _Atlantia_ after Bill's retirement, and while she's home she decides to go surprise him with a visit. He's just Bill now, or sometimes still "Boss" when she feels like it. Whenever she shows up at his place like this he always messes with her by pretending not to be glad to see her and says something like "Great, this is all I need today" or "Glad you're here, I need somebody to shoot my neighbor's dog" in that simultaneously gruff and soft way of his, and then she just rolls her eyes and walks in like she lives there.

Today they sit together on the couch watching a game on TV and smoking cigars, Kara resting her feet up on a table over a mess of newspapers and mail. She is disappointed whenever she catches him at a time the house is actually tidy because she doesn't get to complain about it and it makes her feel like a guest. Even though she's here only occasionally, his house has started to feel more like her home on Caprica than her apartment she's had for years.

"It's funny for you to show up now," Bill eventually says, and she can somehow tell that this is something he's been waiting to say ever since she got here. "You'll never believe who was just here yesterday."

"Never believe? Hmm...the maid?" she says after pretending to ponder.

He laughs, but he soon looks serious again. "Lee."

She freezes in surprise a moment. "Did you have someone kidnap him and drag him here or something?" she says, still joking but failing to make her easiness completely convincing. "I hope they beat the shit out of him while they were at it."

"Hey. He's still my son."

"Last time I saw him that still didn't seem to mean much to him...What the frak, I thought Lee was on the _Poseidon_ now."

"I guess he's on leave right now, too."

Kara goes still and silent again as she processes that. "He came to see you," she says, not as a question, as if she's just trying to get used to the idea by saying it.

"It wasn't the warmest reunion you can imagine. He didn't even really get to the point and say what made him come see me. We just caught up. And very deliberately avoided certain sensitive subjects."

She stays silent, trying to picture such a meeting in her mind. The idea of Lee having been right in this house the day before somehow doesn't seem real.

"He asked about you," Bill then adds casually.

Kara puts on a cold, unconcerned mask. "Did he?"

"Just asked me how your new post is working out for you and if you've been alright." He looks closely at her for a moment. "Him hating me is something I can understand. But the way you and him..."

"I don't...I don't _hate_ him," she says uncomfortably. "I guess I just didn't see what he was really like until things got really tough. He's your son. You don't get off the hook when he's acting like a bastard because you'll always love him anyway. But I don't have to be stuck with him. He's not _my_ family."

He just scrutinizes the look on her face for a few seconds. Then as he gets up to go the kitchen she thinks she hears him mutter, "Sure."

 

Later that day, Kara feels restless and goes out jogging in one of the biggest parks in Caprica City. As she tries to focus on nothing but her running steps, she can't stop hearing some things Bill said echoing in her head. _"You'll never guess who was just here yesterday...I guess he's on leave now, too."_

This has always been Kara's favorite park. She used to come here all the time with Zak, and sometimes also Lee. It has a very long, winding trail to run on and a huge fountain in the center with a statue of Aurora which she once got in trouble for trying to swim in when she was little.

Once when they were all here jogging together, she was first stretching and then doing sit-ups in the grass with Zak helping her by holding her feet down. When he saw the wind knock his water bottle over on the ground where it started spilling out and left her to go grab it, Lee kneeled in front of her and suddenly took his place. He said, "Teller" so she would know it was him and not be disoriented when the next sit-up brought her face-to-face with someone else who was holding her feet in place.

"Are you guys ever going to tell me what it means when you say that?" Zak asked.

"No," they both answered.

After they all chuckled a little, Lee added, "Sorry, it's just too funny when it confuses you so much."

Kara runs along the path left foot right foot left right. _"Sorry it's just too funny"_ —

Sometimes it's alarming how well she can remember the feeling of Zak touching her, just the certain way he would smooth his thumb across her face while kissing her or drag his lips so lightly over her skin just breathing warmly against her, as if he hasn't been gone for long at all, but there are other things from that distant past that sometimes still resonate vividly. A hot, pressing crowd in the dark at a concert and an unexpected warning voice behind her, a soft deep voice she knew very well but which in that moment had some kind of shaking and wrong effect on her combined with the feeling of hands taking her waist securely, solid warmth felt through her thin T-shirt for the second they remained there. A shock to the system with a lasting effect lingering into the next moment, lingering even now and making the constant ache she has learned to live with sing sharply.

These memories are not as painful as the others but are more threatening and near. Kara runs and runs to let it slide away, her eyes steely and locked firmly on the path ahead. Lee Adama is in the city and he went to see his father. Left right left right left right. He's the one who's still alive, he's somewhere, and he's near right now. She ignores the thought and processes only the movement of her feet that unconciously grows faster, left right left right leftrightleftright, until her world fills and overflows with just her rhythmic heavy breathing and propelling steps and the bright sun pounding down on her and blindingly filling her periphery on one side.

 

They were together that day. They were with each other the moment they found out. That was the worst thing.

She and Lee were both off duty and at home with nothing to do, so they caught a movie along with one of his old high school buddies who was visiting in the area. Something called _Black Swan_ that was supposed to be a good thriller with an insane twist in the end and which they knew Zak had no interest in seeing with them. She still remembers that much, but couldn't recall anything that actually happened in the movie anymore.

Then later his friend had to leave for some reason, but they were going to meet up with him again later to hit the bars. They killed time at a store because Lee had to pick up laundry detergent and coffee.

It wasn't like they were doing anything wrong, but that doesn't seem to make any difference now whenever this is what she tries to rationally tell herself. Kara sat in the shopping cart he pushed around the store with a sucker in her mouth, flipping through a sports magazine she'd taken from the front. When she said something teasing to him at one point he leaned the cart up on two wheels for a second as if he was going to throw her out of it; when this made the sucker fall out of her mouth and land sticking to a page of her magazine, they both broke into wild, loud laughter and got an annoyed glance from an old guy passing them in the aisle.

It was after he'd checked out and they were leaving that the phone in Lee's pocket rang.

Twenty minutes later, they had barely moved. They were sitting very still out in the cold on a bench outside the store, Kara sitting far on one end and turned slightly away from him. Lee had finished talking to whoever it was on the phone—some family friend Kara didn't know who was with their mother right now—after asking so many questions in a pleading kind of voice that was a stab right to her heart to hear to try to get all the hows and whys, how does somebody crash their bird in a routine mission like that, like it made any difference. Like he was asking the right person.

Now he was just holding his phone very tightly in his hand, leaning over with his arms drawn in close to himself and crossed, and she was somewhere else as she just stared off into the air seeing nothing. It was the beginning of autumn and she wasn't at all aware of the cold getting into her body, just of her engagement ring turning to ice on her finger and the memories flooding into her head. All the kinds of maneuvers he messed up on his flight test. Any one of them. And her and his brother laughing together all day and at the moment he goes down down all alone in that enclosed little ship. Those were the only hows and whys needed.

Finally she heard Lee take in a shaking breath behind her before he managed to speak. "They told my mom...it happened quickly," he said in a struggling, jagged voice. "He might not even have had a chance to see what was going to happen and be scared."

She just nodded after a while, taking in a soft gasping sort of breath, but she felt like telling him to shut up. He was the one who needed to hear things like this from someone. He was the godsdamn brother, and she was...would now never be...

"Listen, I think I should really get to the house and..." Out of the corner of her eye she saw him shift position for the first time in what felt like hours, moving forward to the edge of the bench as he rubbed his eyes. "My mother..."

She nodded again, still not moving. It didn't even occur to her that he was assuming she'd come, too, until he stayed there and kept looking at her as if waiting for more of a response.

"Kara?" he said with some unvoiced sadness, just wanting her to say something.

Turning inward to face him a little more but still not directly meeting eyes with him, she said softly, "Yeah. Go. Be with your family."

She shifted her eyes to him just long enough to glimpse the shock and deep concern in his eyes before he said, "I can't just—"

"I'm sorry." She cut him off before he could make it any worse, her voice very removed and dead-sounding, shaking her head. "I'm sorry, I just...I can't be there. It's okay, I'll get home. Just go..." With her last words her voice started trailing off, getting weaker, and her head sunk as she stared down at her lap and her hands resting there, the silver band. She didn't know how much longer she could keep from breaking down or whatever she was going to do, she might just implode into dust because she didn't deserve to exist, and she couldn't stand the thought of letting it all finally come out however it was going to come out while he was there.

Lee kept looking at her a while, then shook his head sadly and lifted his hand to touch her shoulder, trying so hard to reach out to her. "Kara..."

Before he could touch her she flinched away from him a little and said quickly but very softly, "No" without even thinking about it, as if his hand was going to burn her. It was the most painful thing she could imagine right now. Her face finally betrayed the inner depth of her devastation then, some tears welling in her eyes as she spoke in a still-quiet voice that somehow sounded begging and a little cruel at the same time. "Don't touch me. Not ever. Please go."

At hearing the words his eyes filled with a very different, regretful kind of despair. She could see he couldn't stand it, but after that was said he knew nothing more he did could do any good.

So with practically visible effort, moving in a way that she could tell just by seeing out of the corner of her eye how hard it was, he turned away from her and didn't let himself say anything more. He got up and walked off to go to his car.

He left his grocery bag sitting on the ground by the end of the bench where he'd been sitting, and for a while Kara stared at it while the chilling breeze blew the plastic around. Stupid little details like this are what she remembers, things like wind pulling at plastic bags and movie posters no longer in bright new colors triggering everything she's pushed away, Lee Adama returning in places she's not supposed to find him because she doesn't think about him. She will not.

 

Kara gets home from grocery shopping just in time to catch her phone ringing. After three rings, she picks up the receiver, curses when she drops it on the table, and then finally says into it, "Sing out."

Nothing.

" _Hello?_ " she says just as she then hears the click.

 

It felt strange to Lee to have so many people inside the house he grew up in for the funeral reception when he hardly spent any time there anymore, and now what it meant to him to be there and remember his childhood had changed so much. Everything in this house had always been immaculately clean, every surface perfectly polished, so that everything looked new and untouched. He wondered if the place seemed as cold to others as it did to him.

As soon as he went out on the back porch that had a view of the lake and mountains, Kara followed him. As he heard her sliding the door shut behind her and then approaching, he didn't turn around. She had to grab his arm and force him to turn and look at her.

"What the hell did you say to your father?" she demanded.

He just looked at her with a little alarm for a moment, not understanding exactly why she was so angry but feeling like he had somehow expected this at the same time. "Why, is he upset?" he asked in a dull tone.

She looked like she wanted to slap him. "Of _course_ he's upset," she said with carefully contained rage. "You frakking _jackass._ His child is dead! What the hell is _wrong_ with you? You feel better after that?"

"You know, I don't see why you care so much," he said. "Maybe you've practically been part of my family for a long time now, but you didn't see the things that went on in this house. You don't know what it was like for Zak and me. You don't have any idea what you're talking about."

" _It doesn't matter_ ," she says. "Not today. This is your brother's funeral. You think he would have wanted it this way? You have to do something, tell him you didn't mean it."

"Are you kidding me?"

"He thinks he's lost _both_ of you for good!" She no longer looked angry, just devastated and hopeless. As he kept coldly looking away from her, she said softly, "Please. For me. I'm not asking you to forget everything, but your family should be together right now."

Something seemed to finally get to him for a second, and he shifted uncomfortably, crossing his arms. But then he just spoke with the same bitter tone. "So you be with him."

Kara stared at his face sadly. So there it was. The inevitable tear of separation that they had already started to feel the pain of the last time they saw each other sitting on the bench outside that store. It seemed like they had both been waiting for this ever since that moment that she wouldn't let him stay there with her: a way to make it easier for both of them. And she couldn't even be truly angry at him anymore right then, for no matter what he was guilty of she was guilty of more, and that was why she cared so much in the first place. There was only so much she could handle feeling responsible for. But it seemed the most she could do to try to fix this disaster at all was remove herself completely from his life.

"Fine," she said. "I will."

Kara felt a strange sense of peace once she was back inside the house and already trying to forget him standing alone out on the porch. She could now remember the last days they'd had, as three, Zak and Kara and Lee, and know that while they lasted those were good times neither of them would give up. She had ended it before she could screw things up any more and so it would be okay.

 

"Good afternoon, Delphi!" says a bright voice on the radio when she finally rolls herself out of bed way too late the next day after a long night spent out with some old friends. She leaves the radio on while she brushes her teeth, washes her face, and spends a good couple minutes just forcing a brush through her hair trying to get all the tangles out.

A small lunch out of what she has in the fridge that hasn't gone bad, some cleaning up around her apartment, and then jogging in the park again. There are now already some big red tents put up here in preparation for the Mars Day festival in a couple days. Too bad she's heard it's expected to rain.

She has been going for almost twenty minutes when she sees a dog running across the path in front of her trailing a leash and then notices who has to be the owner, a middle-aged woman frantically chasing after it but so behind it's obvious she'll never catch up.

Kara sighs and veers right off the path into the grass, trying to run after the dog to help catch it. She loses sight of it for a few seconds when it disappears over a hill, and then when she follows it and goes over the top she immediately freezes in her steps, eyes going wide.

The dog has stopped running and is going right up to someone whose side is turned to her as he kneels in front of it. He grabs the leash and then stands back up, looking around, and then he sees her and also freezes.

She and Lee are both just standing like this and staring at each other in alarm when the woman catches up to them and starts thanking Lee.

"Sure" is all he manages to say in his disorientation as he turns to her and lets her take the leash. Then she goes off and leaves them still looking at each other like they were before a moment longer.

Kara's look of surprise turns more mild, and then she just slowly turns away and starts to go back toward the path.

"Kara," he calls behind her, his tone unsure, and she can hear him following her.

"What?" she says carelessly, not looking back at him as she speaks and keeps walking. "If you have something to say to me, you'll have to keep up."

So he follows alongside her as she goes on running, but he doesn't say anything. He just keeps up, chasing her as closely as a shadow, as she finishes a lap around the entire park and then starts another. They eventually speed up to an aggressive pace, making pigeons scatter from the pavement in front of them as they turn quickly around corners and nearly running into a few people walking on the path, all the while keeping their faces turned forward and never looking directly at each other. Kara wipes her hair that is wet with sweat out of her eyes, breathing in almost angry-sounding gasps, feeling like she could do this all day and wondering how long it would take to shake him off her tail.

Then Lee disappears from the corner of her eye when he trips and falls straight to the ground.

"Ah, _frak!_ " he says.

A few feet ahead of him, she stops running and turns around to look at him, catching her breath. "Come on," she says, and only then notices that he's bleeding profusely from the knee he landed on. "Oh, _shit._ "

"Landed on a frakking broken bottle," he says, tossing away a large, bloodied chunk of glass.

"Well, wrap it up with something!" Kara says as she comes closer. "It's bleeding like crazy."

"Like what?"

"Oh, for frak's sake—" She takes her shirt off over her head as she kneels on the ground and then ties it tightly around his knee. "Gods, this looks bad. How the hell did a bottle do this?"

"Yeah," he says as she stands up and then takes his hand to help him up. "Guess I should get to a hospital."

He starts trying to walk away with her while still holding her shirt over his knee to keep it from sliding down, and she asks, "Where's your car?"

"You think I drive here? It's only eight blocks."

"Okay...Damn." Kara stops and thinks for just a moment, then touches his shoulder to signal him to stay before she starts walking off. "Just wait here."

"What are you doing?"

"Just wait right there!" she calls back as she runs off.

A few minutes later, he sees something coming from far away and immediately says incredulously to himself, "Oh no..."

Kara is driving her huge four-by-four right over the grass to get directly to him. People in the park all around stop where they are and stare, some laughing, as she speeds toward him and then comes to an abrupt stop ten feet away.

"You are _beyond insane,_ " he says as he climbs into the passenger seat.

She just breaks out into giddy laughter and starts speeding away again before he's even quite shut the door.

"It's hardly like I'm _dying_ , you know," he says.

"Didn't want to wait for your slow ass," she says as she turns quickly onto the road at the end of the block.

 

As they reach the hospital, Lee looks at her and says, "I assume you don't intend to come inside like that," referring to the fact that she is wearing only a sports bra on top.

"Absolutely not," she says, and he gets the impression she wouldn't even if properly dressed.

Only then does Lee realize something and say, "Oh. Crap."

"What?"

"I don't even have my wallet. I don't have insurance information or anything on me."

"What? _Why?_ "

"I wasn't exactly planning to stop for coffee or anything."

She sighs heavily. "Give me your keys and go on in. I'll get it and just bring it to the desk."

He takes his keys out of his pocket and as he hands them to her he starts, "Do you remember what—?"

"Yeah, I know which room it is," she says.

He gets out of the car and she immediately drives off, sighing again and shaking her head as she turns her music up very loud.

 

Lee's phone is ringing when she unlocks the door to his apartment and goes inside. As she takes a moment to idly look around the apartment that looks a little different now than she remembers, she hears someone leaving a message.

"Hey Lee, it's Jill. Just calling you back. Thought you should know I'm leaving today and will be out of town for the rest of the week, so I guess I'll just see you when I'm back. Bye."

Kara only now realizes that she didn't even ask Lee where his wallet was. As she moves a bunch of newspapers around on a table to see if it's under anything there, she finds something that makes her stop for a second. Lee's chain with his dog tags is sitting in the bottom of a fancy, clean glass ashtray in the middle of the table. She picks it up and dangles the tags in front of her face, smirking at them and muttering, "Son of a bitch," and then carries them in her hand as she keeps looking around.

When she goes back into his bedroom, she finally sees the wallet on the small table by his bed. She puts it in her back pocket and absently puts the dog tags on around her neck. Then she opens up his closet and smiles mildly as she looks through a bunch of his shirts, many of which look familiar. She picks a dark red one and puts it on with the top three buttons left undone and rolls up the sleeves to her elbows.

When her hand takes the door knob on her way out, she stops as if she suddenly feels someone watching her, remembering something, and then looks behind her at a wall where she knows there was always a framed photo of Lee and Zak when they were seventeen and fifteen. And there it still is, Zak's face, the sight bringing a tight and constrained feeling in her chest like it always does now.

She blinks, turns back around, and hurries out.

 

Fifty minutes and nine stitches later, Lee goes out into the waiting room of the hospital to find her wearing his shirt and looking at a magazine with her feet up on a table.

"You're still here," he observes, as if it surprises him a little.

She closes the magazine and tosses it down. "Your girlfriend or somebody called while I was at your place," she says.

He looks a little confused a moment. "Who, Jill?"

"That's the one, I think. I assume you only have one."

He just smirks and then sits on the edge of the seat next to her.

She looks over at him, biting her lip and looking a little bored, and then asks, "So can I see?"

Lee lifts up the bandage on his knee and she leans over to look close at the nasty long gash that is now sewn up.

She grimaces at the sight. "Does it hurt?"

He shrugs. "Yeah."

She looks back up at his face. "I know what'll help."

 

At a bar not far from Lee's apartment, they order the first round of shots to get it over with before they try talking much. Then Kara takes off his dog tags and starts playing with them, winding the chain around her fingers, and when Lee notices the name on them he goes still and stares.

"What are you doing with those?" he asks.

"What are you doing without them?" She drops them on the table in front of him. "You're not off duty right now, are you? You're done."

Lee picks up the tags and puts them in his pocket. "Yeah."

"I always wondered when you'd finally find the balls to do your own thing. What _are_ you gonna do now?"

"Not sure yet."

"Hm. And you haven't told your dad yet."

"I did go see him. I thought I was going to tell him, but it ended up going so smoothly I decided not to push my luck by bringing up anything like that."

"In other words, you chickened out. Do you _really_ think he'll give you a bunch of grief about it?"

He just shrugs. "It's hard to say what I really think when it comes to him anymore. All I know is it felt like the military was the only connection to each other we had left."

She rolls her eyes. "Give me a break...He did tell me you'd been around to see him. I just about had a heart attack."

Lee goes silent in thought for a while, knowing he's being prodded for some kind of explanation. "I guess I've been thinking a lot about what you said the last time I saw you," he says. "And even at the funeral...It's weird. Our parents are supposed to give us everything we need and be these heroes we can look up to. Sometimes it's hard to see that they have limits and can frak up as easily as we can. When I was growing up, I hardly ever saw my dad at all, and I certainly never saw him show any weakness. He was like this god who just occasionally graced us with his presence. And it was so strange, seeing him out of the uniform, out of work, just sitting at home with his bathrobe when I came over...I don't know. I guess I'm finally being able to see him as just a man."

"Is this your way of admitting you were an idiot for not realizing how the kind of things you've said to him would actually hurt him?" Kara asks. "Because you're saying this to the wrong person. What the hell are you doing with me right now anyway?"

He laughs. "Good frakking question. I didn't even know you were home right now, and I just run into you somewhere."

She easily detects the lie in his words and remembers a strange phone call, but she pushes it out of mind and doesn't say anything about it.

"So," she says after sighing like she's bored with the subject. "Lee. It's been a while. How's life? Why don't you tell me about your girl? Jill. It's Jill, right?"

He cocks an eyebrow, easily reading her complete disinterest in what she's asking about, but resolves to humor her. "She's not 'my girl.' We've just gone out a few times."

"I see. A new thing. What, hasn't she let you frak her yet?"

Lee looks confounded and says, "What the hell makes you assume that?"

"Uh, I don't know, maybe that you have the painfully obvious air of someone who hasn't gotten laid in way too long...Or maybe that's just you. I've had a long time to stop being so used to your constant tight-assedness."

He rolls his eyes. "Not that there's any good reason to tell you, but I _have_ slept with her."

"Wow. And it was that bad, huh?"

"You're unbelievable."

She grins devilishly. "So where's she from?"

"Aerilon, actually."

Kara's mouth drops open a moment while he just smirks at her reaction. " _Aerilon?_ " she says back incredulously. "Oh. _Nice_ , Lee. Way to broaden your narrow little rich-boy horizons. How the hell did you meet _her?_ "

"Well...I got off on the wrong stop when I was trying to take a shuttle to Picon, and during my accidental visit to her Colony I rescued her from being used as a human sacrifice to the gods."

Kara throws her head back with explosive laughter, hitting the counter.

"Actually, we live on the same floor," he amends through his own laughing.

"Oh." She snorts. "So much for broadened horizons."

He jabs her with his elbow as she keeps laughing a little, making her drop the empty shot glass in her hand.

"Wow," she says, waving down the bartender for another shot as she sets the glass upright again. "I don't think I've ever _once_ met anyone from Aerilon in Caprica City."

"Just because they aren't easily recognizable by wearing the most typical farm clothes possible doesn't mean they're not around," Lee says, sending her into giggles again.

"Well, now I know why she's so bad," she says, looking like she can't resist. "You know what they say about the Aerilonese..."

He shakes his head, smiling uncontrollably. "Oh, don't even..."

"They're eager for some action—you know, after living most their lives in old-fashioned small towns—but not necessarily experienced, right?"

"I didn't say _anything_. Look, she's lived on Caprica for seven years. I know it's not like I'm the first."

"Yet you're still trying not to laugh."

Lee shakes his head as she downs her shot, giving up, and then does laugh a little with a new thought. "Gods, how did I forget what a mean bitch you are?"

"I know, I know," she says. "Sorry. I'm sure she's great. I'm sure she's really...sweet."

Lee rolls his eyes again at her still mocking tone. "I happen to like nice girls, okay?"

"Of course you do. Why shouldn't you? After all...you're a nice guy. Usually."

Something makes Lee frown, his head filling with dark thoughts, those steep edges he avoids. _Do it do it do it._

"Not that nice," he mutters before picking up his glass and taking the shot.

"What?" she says, though he's pretty sure she heard it.

He just shakes his head.

Now Kara is frowning, too. She lets out a long, exasperated breath, leaning over and resting her chin over her arm on the table. She stares at her glass, spinning it with one finger, and then speaks with a dark yet almost joking tone, as if she is just playing with an idea by trying to voice it in a way that makes sense.

"Well...what if I told you I killed your brother?"

Lee goes completely still and silent beside her. After a long hesitation, he starts speaking very carefully. "We both have to live with what happened to Zak. And it's probably natural to think of ways we could have prevented it or just things we would never have done or even thought if we knew we were going to lose him. Hell, the last time I saw him I kept bothering him about how he owed me fifteen cubits...But you can tear yourself up forever about what you took for granted or things you thought before and it doesn't change the fact that these things just happen and are completely out of our control."

"Blah, blah, blah," she mutters, still looking at the countertop. "Tell me something I _haven't_ heard a million times before that doesn't help."

He hesitates even longer this time, and then his voice starts to sound quiet and very different, almost like he's talking more to himself. "You can meet someone and know right from the beginning that they're not for you," he starts very slowly. "That it can never be. But sometimes...it doesn't stop you from feeling something anyway. And that doesn't make you a bad person. We can't all be completely in control all the time."

Kara swallows as she sits up and still doesn't look at him, immediately fighting the nervousness rising in her. "You can," she says a little mockingly. "That's who you _are_."

"That's just what you think."

"Well, all I know is you've never done anything to surprise me in all the time I've known you."

They both say nothing more for a long time, drinking one more round. Then the bartender leaves the bottle of liquor he's been serving them with on the counter as he goes to another end of the bar. Kara eyes him for a moment as he's turned away mixing a cocktail, then quickly leans across the counter to grab the bottle and hides it in her jacket to smuggle it out. She tosses a thirty-cubit note on the counter so it isn't quite stealing and mutters to Lee, "Let's go."

Lee doesn't even blink. It's something she used to do so often she probably owes every bar in Caprica City a fortune in profit. He just gives her a slightly disapproving look and then follows her out.

It's surprising how easy it is to fall back into their old ways, laughing together as easily as they used to as they walk together back to his apartment passing the bottle back and forth, never seeming to run out of stories to tell from all the time they've been out of touch. But of course, at the same time, it feels very different from the way it used to be. There is finally, through all their laughter, some painful inner acknowledgment and acceptance that the old times are really gone and this is it. Just the two of them now.

Kara only meant to walk him back to his place and enjoy the nice night and then take a taxi home, but she soon realizes she hardly has any money left. By the time they sloppily drag themselves up the stairs in his apartment building and make it to his room they're both ready to collapse, but Lee has somehow ended up in worse shape than her and she ends up half-carrying him to his room. As she supports him with an arm around his waist, he goes to the bed and falls into it so quickly he almost pulls her down with him, which makes her have to just stand leaning over with her hands on the bed to support herself for a while as she keeps laughing so much it makes her stomach sore. He just lies completely still like he's going to pass out any moment.

"Look...your shoes are still on," she says, and then it takes her a ridiculously long time to be able to pull his shoes off and throw them on the floor.

"Heh...So are yours," he murmurs, belatedly responding.

"No shit," she says, rolling him all the way onto his back so he isn't so dangerously close to the edge of the bed. Then something very serious and wounded that has crept into the look on his face makes her stop and look at him.

Lee's voice comes out sounding strangely detached and unconscious, and suddenly deeply sad. "Did we kill him?" he says quietly. "Did we...sometimes...want him out of the way?"

She frowns, struck silent as she looks down at him, and after a while he drowsily looks away from her and closes his eyes. She slowly sinks to the floor and then turns to sit with her back against the bed, picking up the bottle from where she left it on the floor and taking another drink. Left alone with the silence and her thoughts pressing in on her, she curls her legs in against her and sinks her face into her crossed arms. Then one hand tightens around the bottle, the other curling into a fist, and she sits back up and throws the bottle across the room so that it shatters against the wall in front of her.

 

 

When Lee wakes up the next morning, the first thing he's aware of is his knee stinging hotly and it takes him a moment for the memories of the previous day to emerge clearly from the drowsy sludge in his head. Then his stomach drops a little as it all comes back.

Kara.

He realizes he has no memory of her leaving or finding anywhere to sleep here, and part of him expects her to have vanished and left no solid proof of her presence besides his bandaged knee. But after he gets up and looks outside his room, he can see her sitting on the couch with the TV on at a low volume. She is sitting with a hand to her face, two fingers touching her temple, and doesn't seem to really be paying close attention to the television. She is wearing one of his shirts that is now a little wrinkled. Even as the sight is familiar, it takes him a second to remember the exact explanation for that, too.

As he starts crossing the room, the broken pieces of the bottle on the floor catch his eye. Before he can ask what happened there, Kara says something without looking up at him.

"You slept like a frakking rock."

Still trying to grasp everything he sees, he joins her in the next room and then looks at her closely. "Did you sleep on the couch?" he asks.

She glances over at him then, raising her brow like she fails to see why it matters. "Yeah."

"Sorry," he says, feeling a little stupid. "I could have found you a pillow and..."

She laughs. "No, believe me, in your condition you couldn't. It's okay, I passed out so cold that sleeping in the bathtub would have sufficed."

He smiles a little, going over to sit on the couch on the opposite end from her. "You want some coffee?"

"No. I'll just go soon."

"How long have you been up?"

"Not long. Half an hour." She hesitates, fiddling with one of the buttons of his shirt, and then adds, "I was almost going to just leave."

His face goes serious, understanding her meaning. "And hope I wouldn't hunt you down again."

"I thought you just ran into me."

"Yeah...I...got lucky," he says slowly and with some difficulty, making it sound clearly like some kind of confession.

"You really think so?" Kara asks with some attempted humor in her tone. "Don't you think it would be better if I left you in peace?"

Lee doesn't smile, hesitating a long time before answering. "It's not like that would bring him back, Kara."

She blinks slowly. "I know that," she says a little severely. She doesn't want to touch this anymore.

He sighs. "Look...I think I said some kind of crazy things last night."

Kara crosses her arms and keeps looking forward, staying silent as if she isn't hearing him.

"But the truth is...when I saw you on the _Galactica_ five months ago I really did want to talk to you, and then I just frakked it up by acting like a stubborn dickhead again."

Kara actually loses enough of her discomfort to snort with laughter for a second, her mouth tightening in a small smile which she instantly covers with her hand.

He grins a little and goes on, "And I know you think I'm finally apologizing to the wrong person, but ever since then I've felt this nagging need to apologize to you...Just like you tried to tell me, Zak wouldn't want it this way. Right after we lost him my only instinct to deal with it was to find who and what to put the blame on, and I've let it go on so long that I've been torn apart from the only people who are my remaining connections to him. And wouldn't he _want_ us to just be happy?"

When she just stays silent as he looks at her, he moves to sit closer to her. This makes her look up at him and pull back from him a barely perceptible fraction of an inch, immediately taking on a guarded and ready look like someone going into a fight.

"Don't you think we need to finally move on?" he says quietly.

She sighs, throwing her hands up in the air a little. "Okay, I get the point," she says, standing up. "I'll call you sometime then, we'll do this again."

He grips her wrist to stop her before she can walk away, stands up and then makes her freeze in surprise when he takes her face in his hands to make her look at him. "Kara," he says softly. "I'm serious. I think we need to forgive ourselves."

"What are you doing?" she says softly, instantly uncomfortable and trying to back away a little as he just follows her movement.

"What, am I finally doing something that surprises you?" he says with a slightly challenging look. "Is this scaring the hell out of you?"

She forcefully pulls his hands away from her and starts to sound a little panicked. "My gods, Lee—You don't even have any idea—"

He grabs her shoulders to keep her facing him, pulling her much too close to him. "What? _What?_ Maybe _this_ will surprise you: I went to Ken Cage's wedding two months ago. I'd barely even spoken to the guy in years. I only went because I thought you might be there."

"Ken's wedding?" she says a little breathlessly, shaking her head. "What the frak are you talking about?"

"I...don't really know..." His expression becomes intensely conflicted as he looks at her face, and suddenly his hands aren't grabbing her shoulders as tightly, touching her too gently and familiarly, and she can feel something in the small space in between them about to snap but can't bring herself to move to make him let go of her again.

Instead she says, "Zak failed basic flight."

 

In Lee's car they used to drive out to isolated roads that went over lots of hills, and Kara would lean forward from the back seat where she was sitting with Zak and crank his music up very loud before they sped over the hills to make their stomachs drop like in a roller coaster. Once it was the middle of summer and there were fireflies all over the place, illuminating the night everywhere they looked like electric blinking lights at a carnival. Zooming past the windows in little blurs of bright yellow they looked like stars and it was like flying in a Viper.

They were young and stupid. Reckless. They stopped to go far out into a field one night and tossed bottles high up in the air to try shooting them. Kara always insisted on staying turned away from Lee or Zak while they threw a bottle up for her to see if she could spin around and aim quickly enough to get it. She was the only one who could do it this way and still hit it.

She wasn't paying attention to where Zak was. Lee threw the last bottle they had lying around in his car and she turned a little slowly, automatically aiming lower than usual in hopes to still get it, and found herself pointing her gun right toward Zak's chest.

Losing her breath for a second, she quickly lowered the gun and then heard the glass shattering on the ground where the bottle landed far away from them.

She always remembers what it looked like when a firefly would hit the front window of the car and splatter. A light abruptly going out, in one tiny doomed instant in the center of time, forever.

 

Something leaves Lee's face very quickly. Then he just stares at her like he doesn't understand and says quietly, "What?"

"He failed his flight test," she says. "Or he should have." She has to stop a moment to collect herself before she can keep grinding through it, lowering her eyes from his face. "He had no feel for flying and couldn't do most of the basic maneuvers."

"What are you talking about?" he says as he slowly drops his hands from her shoulders and shakes his head just a little, not letting himself register what she means. But there is an edge of desperation in his voice and his face, begging her not to make it real even as he's starting to see the pieces fit together.

"Come on, Lee," she says. "You're smart, I'm sure you can figure it out. It wasn't your _dad_. Wake up."

"Frak you," he says breathlessly, aimlessly turning away from her and raking his hands in his hair like he doesn't know what to do. "Why are you telling me this?"

The words pull something apart in her, bringing the moment into focus, and suddenly she can only sadly look at his back. Then she sounds much less hardened and cold than before when she says very softly, "It wasn't your dad. And it wasn't...It was me. I'm responsible."

She hears Lee let out a long, shaky breath. He moves to the side a little and sinks down to sit on the edge of the coffee table, still facing away from her, grabbing hold of the edges of the table like he just needs to hold onto something right now.

Kara looks away from him, crossing her arms tightly and practically holding herself as if she's cold, and then turns and goes to the door with her head hanging down. The sound of the door shutting pulls Lee out of the haze, and he looks over at the door and the suddenly empty room. And all he can process is a strange feeling of abandonment like a blanket being yanked off of him, the instability, no longer knowing cause and effect and what is what.

 

She knows how this works. The trick is to just keep moving. Don't touch it again, don't think, just move on, leave behind.

The bright sun above is scalding pain in her temples as she walks back to the bar where her car is still parked, hung over and stretched thin. She passes a news stand and sees a headline on a magazine cover about "former star Pyramid player Liz Teller" and laughs darkly, almost hysterically, to herself. The threat is banished.

 

The next day is the last whole day Kara has to be at home. In the morning the voice on her radio chipperly wishes everyone a happy Mars Day before she turns it off and saunters tiredly over to the fridge for some juice. Then she sees the note she left for herself there two days ago that just says "RENT" in bold marker.

" _Frak,_ " she whispers to herself with her hand still on the handle of the refrigerator door, rolling her head back to stare with self-annoyance at the ceiling for a second.

Kara shoves a mess of mail and books off her table before she finds her checkbook at the bottom of it and quickly writes out a check for her landlord. When she is about to leave to go put it in his mailbox, she opens her door and then freezes in surprise.

Lee is standing right outside her door, now looking at her with an alarmed face that mirrors hers. It might be her imagination that he looked a little like he was turning to leave when she first opened the door, as if he was changing his mind.

After the awkward initial surprise, he finally recovers from the moment first and speaks unsurely. "Um...here." He takes something gray out of his back pocket and holds it out to her. "I washed it."

It's her shirt that she let him use to wrap around his knee, now clean and folded into a small square. She takes it and lets it fall out from the folded shape, still surprised and disoriented as she stares at it a second.

"You didn't have to do that," she says. Not coldly. Then she takes a closer look at it and raises an eyebrow. "Wow. You actually got all the blood out of it."

He just shrugs. "Cold water is the trick."

She smirks. "I'll have to remember that," she says, her tone a little sarcastic to imply how likely that is.

Then another stretch of silence. Lee nobly saves it again, leaning against her doorway and awkwardly shoving his hands in his pockets as he talks again. "So. When do you leave again?"

"Tomorrow," she says.

He nods, looks away from her eyes for a second. "Well...I'm supposed to be at the festival for a while with some friends tonight..."

Her brow raises slightly. "So am I."

He registers that for a second and then nods again. "Alright. So maybe I'll see you there."

She nods slowly. "Okay."

Lee turns away, and as he starts leaving down the hall she stays standing still in the doorway like she isn't sure what just happened. Before he gets far enough to be out of view he slows to a stop, turns his head around, and just looks at her with an easy and slightly mischievous smile. It's the kind of look he once would have often given her when they were with a group of people and they knew they were both seeing the humor in something that nobody else there understood.

After he then keeps walking and disappears down the hall, Kara just shakes her head, grinning only a little. Suddenly it seems like she should have figured it would be like this. Of course he will just act as if nothing has happened. For Lee, anything else would just make too much sense.

 

Later as Kara changes into an old, faded band T-shirt and some jeans, her mind just barely brushes against the secure thought that the odds of happening to see Lee tonight when thousands of people will be at the Mars Day festival are quite small. All she knows right now is she's going back to the _Atlantia_ tomorrow and that will be somewhat of a relief in some ways, but she's determined to have a good time first.

The park is tightly crowded and nearly unrecognizable when she gets there, decorated with colorful banners and streamers everywhere and packed full of vendors selling food, balloons, and firecrackers. As she approaches the edge of the park, walking the few blocks from the closest parking spot she could find, she can hear a band nearby playing jigs and the distant thrilled screams from the area where some rides are set up.

She makes her way to the fountain in the center of the park and sits waiting on the edge, idly touching the backs of her fingers to the surface of the water and looking up at the goddess statue far above her with the wings and arms stretched wide and face looking upward hopefully. Kara thinks about how people say washing your hands in the Aurora Fountain will cleanse you of any past sins and burdens so you can start anew. Except for people who actually live in Caprica City, who will tell you this water is filthy as frak and not even at all pretty to look at.

"I hope you're praying it won't rain."

She jumps in alarm at the sound of the voice, looking down to see Lee standing right next to her. "Holy _crap,_ " she says as she recovers from the surprise.

"Sorry," he says, smiling a little as he sits down next to her.

Kara shakes her head, looking at him like it makes no sense for him to be here. "Am I really that hard to miss whenever I set foot in this park?" she asks.

"I should be asking you. I'm only here to meet a friend and his sister."

She slowly smirks as she understands. "Right. At the fountain. At seven-o-clock. Good idea."

He grins. "You're meeting somebody here right now, too, aren't you?"

Her giggling gives him the answer.

Now smiling wide, Lee holds up his phone he has in his hand and says, "But I just now got a call and found out they'll be late. Or might not be coming at all."

She gives him an exaggerated frown and then looks up again, this time past the statue at all the heavy gray clouds gathering above. "Look at that sky."

"Yeah," he says. "I'm surprised they didn't cancel the whole thing."

"Whatever. Nothing like a little lightning with the bonfire."

"That's the spirit," says a new voice behind her.

She turns to find Karl standing by them and immediately jumps to her feet with excitement. Somehow she forgot all about him for a moment.

" _Helo!_ " she says, drawing his name out in an excited growl as she hugs him. "It's great to see you."

"Look at your hair!" he says with surprise at how different she looks, pulling at a lock of it as he pulls away. "Has it really been that long since I've seen you?"

Lee has now stood up to join them, and Karl finally looks over at him questioningly.

"Right. Um..." Kara gestures toward him a little awkwardly. "Karl, this is Lee."

He raises an eyebrow. "Lee...As in Captain Adama?"

"Not anymore," Lee answers, smiling and holding a hand out.

"Good to meet you, man," Karl says, shaking his hand. As Kara looks on, she has to grin at how well he hides his surprise. "Leave it to Starbuck to neglect to mention I'd get to today."

Lee starts looking even more awkward and says, "Oh, well...It was kind of a last-minute—"

"We just ran into each other," Kara says, her words overlapping his last ones and cutting him off.

Karl just looks at them with some confusion for a silent moment and then says, "Okay."

"I thought _you_ were bringing someone with you," Kara says.

"Yeah, she's in line for drinks."

"Which is where we should be," she says, her expression brightening as she turns and the others start following her.

"You don't waste any time, do you?" Lee says with a laugh, and then he and Karl exchange an understanding grin of amusement.

When they reach the nearest stand selling drinks, Karl introduces them to his new girlfriend, a short girl with brown hair in a smooth ponytail named Rhea. She flashes her and Lee a blindlingly earnest and sweet smile that makes Kara unable to help but not like her right away. Then she and Karl go to wait at a table while Lee and Kara get in line.

They end up waiting behind three obnoxiously loud guys who are all wearing Caprica Buccaneers shirts and caps and don't stop complaining the whole time they're in hearing range of their conversation.

"This is frakking _bullshit_. It's not even raining yet and that dumbass closes it right after we've been in line for twenty frakking minutes."

"Shoulda just punched the frakker in the face. Frakking hell, if there weren't cops all over the place here..."

As they keep cursing loudly about it and only seem to keep getting more pissed, Kara and Lee finally look at each other like they're trying hard not to laugh. Then when the first of them gets to the front, he only starts holding up the line by arguing with the vendor.

" _Look,_ lady, I bought these tickets and now they aren't letting anyone on the rides, so can't you—?"

"I'm sorry," says the woman he's yelling at for the third time, "but you can't buy anything here with tickets. You'll have to get a refund for them and come back."

"Fine, you know what? _Frak you_ , okay? I got—"

"Excuse me," Lee interrupts, forcefully pushing him aside to come forward and then giving the woman an apologetic smile as he starts to order.

The man looks lividly at him and moves to get back in his way, but Kara casually moves beside Lee to block him, looking up at him a second to give him her most threatening smile and wink. He finally gives up and storms off with his friends.

When they rejoin Karl and Rhea, Kara immediately says, "I hope you guys didn't buy any tickets. Word on the street is they've closed the rides, apparently."

Lee starts laughing and then he and Kara both proceed to crack up uncontrollably for a moment as the others just look confused, missing what's so funny. Then Karl takes a long string of eight tickets out of his pocket to show them, and they all laugh.

He looks to the side at Rhea and asks, "How'd you like a teddy bear?"

Lee and Kara stand by watching and drinking from their bottles of cheap Tauron brew while Karl and Rhea both try shooting at targets with toy guns to win a prize.

"So you really don't have any kind of a plan?" Kara asks him. "Isn't there anything you want to do?"

"Sure, I have _ideas_ ," Lee says. "I'm thinking I'll go back to school. Study law, maybe. That's something I always considered."

" _Law?_ " she says. "Well, okay. Now I guess I can understand why you're so nervous about coming clean with your dad about this."

He chuckles. "Shut up."

Lee stays silent in thought for a while as she takes a cigar out of her pocket and lights it. She takes one puff and then passes it to him.

"You know what I used to think I'd like to do?" he says before putting it in his mouth. "As just a sort of crazy fantasy?"

"What?"

"I thought it would be nice to just open up a bar."

She smiles. "A bar?"

"Yeah, on a beach. Someplace where it's warm year round. I hate winters here."

Kara shrugs and says, "So do it. Why not?"

He shakes his head a little, seeming somehow disturbed. "Do it..."

"Yeah. For gods' sakes, Lee, you should have _something_ you've always wanted but would never go after because of your enormous sense of responsibility."

He takes a long swig from his bottle, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and finally replies in a pensive tone. "Yeah. That's what I've been thinking. It's funny. I think sometimes, maybe living the way you think you should be living for other people...like when I felt like I needed to set a good example for Zak...Sometimes it's not responsible. Being self-interested and just going for what you want isn't necessarily unkind. It's... _honest_. You know?"

She looks at him and very slowly smiles wide. "Okay, so which is it then? Are you a nice guy today or aren't you?"

Lee looks at her seriously a moment, and then his face just cracks into a slightly nervous-looking smile like he's been caught off guard.

Before he can respond they hear Karl saying to them, "Am I good or what?" They finally look away from each other to see him holding a giant stuffed seal he just won.

"You're a dork," Kara says in a flat tone, making Rhea snort with laughter.

It is getting very dark by the time they find a table to sit at near where the band is playing next to a huge bonfire.

"Aw, that sucks," Karl says after they see a little girl in the distance lose hold of her balloon and start crying as it floats away.

"She's still probably having ten times more fun than we are," Rhea says, the stuffed animal now held in her lap. "Remember what a big deal Mars Day was when you were a kid?"

"And we had no idea it's a holiday honoring the god of war," Kara says.

"It's a celebration of peace time," Lee says. "And our past victories that have brought us here. Come on, _you_ should know that," he adds teasingly, nudging her in the side.

"I know, I'm just saying," she says. "So does that mean it _would_ be kind of morbid to celebrate it if we were at war right now?"

"Well, I imagine we'd acknowledge it pretty differently. That's what it was like during the Cylon War."

"Let's just be grateful we're _not_ at war and leave it at that," Karl says.

Kara laughs. "Like there's any threat of that happening. As long as there's no inter-Colonial conflict..."

"As long as?" Lee echoes with a look of disbelief. "What, you think there _isn't_ any? Don't you pay any attention to politics? The news?"

She shrugs. "No."

"I hardly see it getting violent any time soon," Karl admits.

"Sure, but to say there's _nothing_ wrong?" Lee says. "I mean, the economic situation on Gemenon right now? On Aerilon? When we depend on the poorer Colonies like them for most of our resources? It's—"

"Okay, okay," Kara says, giggling and covering her hand over Lee's mouth to make him stop as she looks at Karl. "Trust me, you do _not_ want to get him started."

Lee just hits her hand away and starts laughing with her. Kara just barely registers it the brief moment Karl looks at the two of them a little strangely, and then she draws both her arms closely back into her own personal space, hunching over the table and picking up her drink.

"Hey, you never know," Karl says in a light tone. "Nobody knows exactly what happened to the Cylons. They could just show up in the sky again some day."

Kara laughs loudly. "Yeah, right! They'll just get bored and decide to come frak us up some more. And we'll be out in our birds getting to shoot at toasters instead of just doing CAPs all day." She pauses to laugh even more with a sudden realization and then says, "Oh my gods...That would be frakking _awesome_."

The others all crack up laughing.

"You _would_ think that sounds like fun," Karl says.

Lee shakes his head. "Yeah, just don't ever say anything like that around the old man."

"Oh, don't worry, I know," she says. "He'll get that _deadly_ serious look on his face like he does and plunge into telling all these scary war stories."

"How it took him years before he stopped having bad dreams about that heavy, mechanical sound the Centurions made—"

"—when they walked," she finishes along with him, going into giggles again.

Karl asks Rhea if she wants to go dance for a while, and as they stand up to go join the large gathering of people dancing by the fire he holds his seal prize out to Kara.

She raises her brow and says, "No frakking way am I carrying that thing around."

Lee takes it and sets it on the table. "But you can _watch_ it while they dance and I go get another drink."

Kara rolls her eyes, turning around to sit with her back against the table as they all leave.

It ends up taking Lee over twenty minutes to get through the line again. When he finally gets back to the bench table where they were, he finds Kara still alone and the stuffed seal gone.

"I bring offerings," he says, holding up the four bottles he bought.

"I see," she says. "Took you long enough."

He gestures toward the bare tabletop. "Did you let it run away?"

"Seals can't run."

He shakes his head with mild annoyance as he comes forward and sets all the drinks down.

"They just left," she explains. "Karl had to take that sweet thing home."

"She didn't say much, did she?" he says as he sits down next to her.

"Well, Helo's like you. He likes them nice. Easy to get along with. The quieter the better."

"See, now you're making me not like him as much somehow," he says, grinning. "A perfectly friendly guy. How do you _do_ that?"

She laughs and says, "I'm kidding." Then she turns around to take one of the bottles and opens it as she says, "Oh well. I guess we'll just have to drink these all by ourselves. Unless you've heard something from _your_ friends again."

"Nope. They don't seem to be coming."

She takes a long drink and then stares away at the fire-lit dancers nearby. "Guess it's just you and me then."

"Yep," Lee says quietly. He looks at all the drinks and says, "And we better finish these fast."

"Why?"

"Because I just saw some lightning. And we still haven't danced."

She slowly smiles, taking the challenge, and then grabs her drink to start chugging. As they each try to finish their two bottles quickly, they keep laughing in between drinks because this seems like such a stupid idea. Then they finally finish and slam their second empty bottles back down on the table at nearly the exact same time, and he immediately stands up and offers her his hand. "Shall we?"

When they join the dance, it quickly becomes hard for them not to keep laughing because they're both now just tipsy enough that it's hard for their feet to keep up with everyone else. Every time one of them switches to a new partner and starts spinning around it makes them so dizzy and disoriented they almost don't make it to the next one at the right time. They've just made it back to each other and sloppily grasped hands again when someone trying to pass right through the area where everyone is dancing knocks right into Kara and pushes her over onto the ground.

"Hey!" she hears Lee say as she sits back up and sees the back of the person who ran into her as he just keeps going with no apology, followed by two friends. It's the Buccaneers fans again. Great.

She jumps back onto her feet and grabs the guy's shoulder to stop him and make him face her. "What's your frakking problem?"

They all stop and look at her, only then recognizing her and Lee.

"Not you two assholes again," says the one who pushed her over.

"That's right," she says, threateningly coming very close to him.

"Lay the frak off," he says, pushing against her chest so roughly she falls back against Lee, who she didn't even realize had come up that close behind her. Then she springs right back forward and punches him hard across the face.

There are many gasps and even a few cheers from the surrounding crowd of people who are now all watching them. All three of the guys are now looking at Kara furiously, and she just stands her ground as they start inching back toward her like she's ready to take all three of them.

"Uh, Kara?" says Lee, who has only now noticed the police officer nearby whose attention they've definitely caught. "Let's go."

She is still so angry he has to grab her around the chest to stop her from going back at them again.

"And frak the C-Bucs!" she yells at them as he starts to drag her away. Then she finally also notices the cop and mutters after reacting with a thrilled kind of giggle, "Oh shit..."

Lee is now smiling too as he grabs her hand and they run off quickly, weaving their way through gaps between the tight crowds and finally taking refuge behind a tent.

"Thanks," Kara says, catching her breath. "Last thing I need is to get arrested again right before I have to report back to my battlestar."

He looks at her with a raised brow. " _Again?_ " he asks.

Right then they feel the first rain drops and they both look up at the dark sky.

"Well, crap," Kara says with a careless grin.

"Let's get out of here," Lee says, and without any verbal agreement to they start running off together in the right direction to leave the park and get to his apartment.

 

By the time they get halfway to Lee's apartment building, the rain has started pouring so heavily it's a little hard to see far and the storm is in a full rage. Their clothes and hair are soaked when they finally get there, and a neighbor who passes them on the stairs notes this and gives them a sympathetic look when they both smile at him.

As soon as they're in Lee's room, he gets a towel from the bathroom, comes back out where Kara is facing away from him looking at some pictures on his wall, and throws the towel over her head. She turns around as she pulls it off her head so she can see and starts trying to dry herself off as much as she can.

"Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to start drinking much," she sighs.

"First time I've ever heard you say _that_ ," he says as he goes back into his room and switches on a lamp. "Would you rather still be in traffic right now?"

"I guess not," she answers as she gives her hair a final vigorous rub with the towel and then throws it over the back of a chair before sitting down in it.

When she looks back over at Lee, his side is facing her as he pulls at the bottom of his wet shirt and peels it away from the smooth, damp surface of his back and chest. She doesn't look away, just stares through it and keeps casually looking in his general direction, focusing her eyes on nothing in particular as if there is nothing there. Then a round of thunder strikes, so shockingly loud it sounds like the sky has to be cracking apart like a porcelain bowl under some kind of intense strain, and she looks toward his one small window at the rain outside that is barely visible now that it's completely dark. As her skin has started drying, she suddenly feels strangely warm all over every surface of it, and something restless is squirming inside her. The air is full of a tangible electricity that is much easier to perceive removed from the pounding rain in the quiet apartment.

As Lee puts on just an undershirt, they both seem aware of the silence getting too thick. He moves out of her view through the doorway and says, "So are you going to tell me about the time you got arrested or not?"

Kara chews her bottom lip and looks down, tensely drumming her fingers on her leg for a moment, and just says something to change the subject. "Have you got a deck of cards and a bottle of ambrosia around here? Looks like I'm stuck here a while."

He reappears and stands right in the doorway, raising his hands to both sides and leaning forward that way as he looks at her. "I'm not betting against you, if you're hoping to rip me off."

"So don't bet," she says, shrugging. "Just play...If you want to take all the danger and fun out of it."

He smirks a little, retreats back into his room to get something and comes back with a handful of cubits. "What the hell," he says. "No frakking around."

Kara rubs her hands together in anticipation. "This night just started to look a lot more interesting."

Lee gestures toward the kitchen. "If I have any ambrosia, it's in the cabinet. I'm sure you would remember which one."

She quickly finds a large half-full bottle among his store and brings it with a couple shot glasses to the coffee table where Lee has now gotten out cards and taken a seat on the floor leaning against the couch. Kara sits on the side of the table adjacent to his as they play. Lee laughs at her when the next loud crack of thunder makes her jump and nearly spit out a mouthful of ambrosia right after she takes a shot. Nearly a half-hour later she has beat him at the first game and the bottle is an inch less full than before, and she has pushed it across to Lee's end of the table to cut herself off in hopes that she'll still eventually be able to get herself home tonight.

"No," Lee says, touching her arm to stop her as she starts dealing the cards for the next game. "Scorpian War this time."

She tilts her head. "You can't play that with two," she objects.

"Of course you can. It'll work."

"But I never have. I don't like that game."

"Wuss," he says, mildly grinning.

"Excuse me?" she says with a laugh. "This from the guy who just lost ten cubits."

She continues dealing the cards for a second until he drops a hand down onto hers to stop her a little forcibly, looking right at her face and shaking his head. "You only play games you know you can win," he says.

Her eyes narrow a little as she registers the challenge. " _Fine,_ " she says, slowly picking all the cards up to deal them differently.

It is a game with a more relaxed pace and less concentration required, so after a while of playing they drift off into easy conversation.

"I guess it's natural to never stop wanting your parents' approval," Kara says, staring a little boredly at her hand and leaning against the table in a very lazy position. "But you're a big boy now, Lee, and you have to realize you're free to do what you want. You don't even have anyone else to look out for anymore. The only person you have to answer to is yourself."

He gives a short, slightly dark laugh. "You make it sound like that's so easy," he says. "Answering to yourself."

"Well, at least you always know what you've got to do."

"But it doesn't exactly mean being free to do whatever you want," he says a little softly, no longer meeting eyes with her.

Kara looks away from him as well, sighs, and says, "Um...I'm calling a check. Show me three."

"Already?" he asks with surprise.

"Yeah. Already."

He selects three cards and puts them on the table in sight, now smiling. "I win," he says before she has even looked at them closely yet.

"What?" she asks in a doubtful tone, as if he has to be joking.

"Count 'em, sir," he says as she leans over to look at them and goes wide-eyed. "That there is a match."

" _Frak!_ " she says loudly, throwing down her own cards. "This game? It doesn't even take any _skill_."

He laughs. "I beg to differ. Plenty of bluffing involved, don't you think?"

"No, not really, I _don't_ think," she says bitterly.

Lee starts laughing harder, increasingly amused by how angry she sounds. "Wow. You really are pissed."

"Yeah, go ahead, act all satisfied because you beat Kara Thrace at _Scorpian War_. A frakking college kids' game."

He just keeps laughing as he starts shuffling the cards again.

"You're right," he says after a while, and she takes a moment to realize he is picking up their former conversation again. "It's a lot easier to just follow the path your parents have laid out for you, and the reason it took me so long to start trying to live the life I really want is because I'm just a little scared of what I don't know and understand so well. I mean...law? It's kind of morally ambiguous territory. Who knows what I'm capable of in that kind of career?"

She smirks in response to his half-joking tone. "You've always been stubbornly certain about what you think is right," she says teasingly. "I think you of all people wouldn't find yourself too conflicted about it and would be able to keep your head screwed on straight."

Lee goes silent, his hands slowing to a stop and then setting the cards down. "That's really strange to hear," he says, still looking down at the table.

She raises her brow. "Why?"

He leans over to look at her face very closely, crossing his arms on the table. "It just doesn't seem true," he says quietly. "Even though I guess the way I _act_ is always so consistent, like I've fallen into this secure and comfortable pattern that's hard to break. But I feel conflicted all the time...Except lately, actually..."

Kara shifts her eyes away from his for a second. Lately. That restless feeling in her chest is building up, fight or flight response taking tight hold of her every nerve. Attack or disengage. Take control and possibly win or risk just getting chased and shot down anyway.

He lets out a soft, slightly nervous laugh. "You asked if I feel like a good guy today?" he says. "Truth is I just feel really...powerless. Like I can't really be right _or_ wrong right now. The world looks kind of absurd and is just...happening to me. And it feels good to just let it for once, instead of trying to be in control."

At some point, without realizing it, Kara has started breathing a little uneasily, and he has drawn a lot closer to her without her immediately perceiving it. As he keeps looking right into her eyes, his gaze never breaking away like a constant and unbearable light in her face, she sees some kind of struggle in his expression for a second before he slowly opens his mouth to say something more.

Piercing thunder cracks again, making them both look away in alarm, and an instant later the lights all shut off.

"Oh, great," Lee sighs quietly as they both look around, their eyes taking a moment to adjust to the darkness. But he doesn't sound like it even bothers him terribly much right now.

Then they both remain where they are in silence, unable to see anything around them clearly at all, the unspoken question formed deafeningly in the air. What can they do now? They stay still like this for a slightly prolonged moment, but something has to happen next and Kara knows it. Whether it happens to her or she makes it happen.

Lee is warm, audible breath in the dark beside her, still very close, and she can see just enough to notice him turning his head and looking back at her again. She feels blind and helpless and she panics. Turns and flies right into the attack. Reaches to him, her hands finding the smooth skin of his shoulders and neck, her mouth finding his before he can start talking again.

At first he freezes up, too taken aback to react to her, but then she can feel his whole body loosen up as he seems to just let his mind detach from it and go passive. His hands are first that strangely familiar solid heat at her back, and then one slides down around her waist and the other raises to tightly take hold of her hair with a surprising and sudden aggression, grabbing the back of her head to pull her a little closer as he starts kissing her more deeply and decidedly, letting out a long and sort of sinking, surrendering breath like a sigh.

That hunger that Kara has tried to become numb to but mostly just learned to live with the distant ache of every day, shutting it away like a plant in a drawer living away from light, is desperately clawing out and thriving in her moment of weakness, of carelessness, whatever this is. Maybe this is what it feels like to be able to finally move on and live again, but somewhere in the back of her mind she already decides it can't really be real; the sour reality will return to her afterwards even if the mindless high of the moment makes it all not matter. And she does not know what she is doing, only that this restless, powerful urge she's been fighting all night is making her feel like pulling him apart in her hands like soft pieces of cotton, in her hands like she can't with words. Let the damage free. It will crash and burn and then this volatile, unspoken thing that's been there so long no matter how long they've tried to kill it will surely have to finally die.

She has pressed him back against the couch and straddled her legs over his lap when Lee first starts to become hesitant again, recoiling as he seems to sense her urgency. He touches both her shoulders and gently, just slightly pushes her back away, leans his forehead in against hers and says softly and uncertainly, "Kara..."

The sound of his voice somehow threatens to break the suspended, comforting spell of being in the dark. She just plants her hands firmly at his neck and jaw on each side and mutters quickly, "Please shut up" before starting to kiss him again.

Lee raises a hand to the back of her head and grabs a handful of her hair again, and this time he roughly pulls her head away from him, forcing it back until her face is turned upward, her neck curved back and exposed, all of her only visible in barely defined, dark shapes. They certainly cannot read each other's faces right now, and Kara has no idea what is going to happen but does think she can detect some kind of determination just in how forcefully he's touching her. When he suddenly bends down and she feels his mouth on her neck, slowly exploring, it comes as a disarming surprise, and without meaning to she closes her eyes.

They have both slipped completely away, lost track of what time it could possibly be now, lost any kind of sense of space and surroundings and the size of the room they're in. There is no longer any hesitation, no conscious thought, only breathing, tasting. Lee somehow keeps pulling things back, keeping it slow and easy. His hands slide inside her shirt and up her back, taking it off over her head, and then she swiftly pulls off his undershirt, but he stops her before she can touch the fly of her jeans by grabbing her wrists. As they don't stop kissing there is a strange momentary struggle, and then he pushes her back to the floor with both her arms pinned back. She half-consciously understands what this is. It's as if they're wrestling for control, each trying to set the pace and determine what exactly this is, a quick frak or something else. And he's decided it isn't going to happen on the floor.

He leads her into a haphazard backwards crawl toward the doorway of the bedroom. They both finally slip out of their pants by the time they've reached the bed and Kara is backing up against it. Then as they sloppily start pulling themselves up onto it together while still intertwined, she hits herself against the bed frame at her tailbone, winces and sharply whispers, " _Ow._ " She automatically reaches behind her to touch the spot she hit, but Lee's hand moves down from her waist, reaches it first and gently rubs it so that it soon stops stinging. Her face cracks into a humored smile he can't quite see, and then as he starts kissing her again and pulls her up onto the bed she makes a soft sound in her throat that sounds like half of a contented laugh.

Lee's hand on her lower back slides around to her front, then creeps down, now slowly rubbing elsewhere. Kara's breath hitches, her whole body clenching and curling inward a little. She clutches his back tightly with one hand, the other at his chest as if to push him away, her nails curling inward just a little as if unintentionally. She doesn't like going at this pace. She does and she doesn't. She can feel that she is losing. Maybe doesn't care anymore.

After a while he seems no longer able to keep holding back himself and they both start to move quickly and eagerly as they pull away the only clothes they still have on. They shuffle themselves around for a moment, finding the position and fit, and then when he finally slides in all slows down for a strangely pacified moment as if they both feel some sudden and great impact, a very heavy latch dropping, something locking tightly into place. _Of course_ , it feels like, like this has always been, in so many moments they didn't realize were only painfully extended preludes to it, though it is only vaguely realized even now.

Then it naturally picks up again, their bodies completely taking over and running themselves, their heads stifled by the building heat. It is so easy, like they are feeling their way around in the dark but it's some place they have been before, as if they've known each other this way already. Kara has retreated into a familiar safe place, running along a path ignoring anything on the periphery, letting everything else but what she feels and sees right now slide away, and soon her world fills and overflows with nothing but the rhythmic heavy breathing and thick darkness.

This is when the power comes back on. The lamp by Lee's bed lights up brilliantly with a soft _flick_ sound from the bulb and they each blink a few times, seeing spots. Kara only now notices that she can no longer hear any rain outside.

And she looks past Lee's shoulder and sees the ceiling above, a lot lower and closer than she thought she remembered. What is happening? Everything is too close, enclosing, past her defenses, inside. The slight panic returns, but she tries to take hold of it and just slide through this without letting it quite touch her, not quite feeling everything with all senses like before.

As she keeps looking far up, Lee brings a hand by her face and lightly touches her hair. He must see something in her face that concerns him because he asks a little breathlessly, "Are you alright?"

She blinks, meets eyes with him with difficulty and slightly smiles in a dark way that doesn't reach her eyes. "No," she says, as if the question is funny.

He shakes his head just a little. "You want to stop?"

"No," she just says again in a mutter. The harm is done.

He seems to see this, too, because after slowing down only a little he just buries his face back in her neck and keeps moving, but he keeps his eyes there and doesn't kiss her anymore. Kara keeps her eyes closed and the light from the lamp is red through her eyelids like an unbearable burning sun. Before long they're nearing the edge, both gasping, and Lee rakes his hand into her hair again like he has to hold onto something and isn't even thinking about it.

When Kara is getting close her voice cracks out in some shapeless soft cries and then forms into some words that manage to fight their way out without any thought. " _Shit_ —Teller—"

"Okay," he says right back in a tight voice; following the cue, he lets go and pushes on through to the end fast and forcibly, until they both reach the top together, hearing each other's breath hold and then release in a final heavy exhale. Then down, relax, collapse together, both their bodies going loose after clutching strongly to each other the whole time.

Lee sits up a little, looks down at her. She doesn't look at him.

With her face turned away on the bed and her eyes fixed on a wall, she says in a calm voice, "Turn the light off."

He waits just a few seconds, then slides off of her and toward the bedside table, reaches over and switches the lamp off. Kara rolls away, turning on her side facing away from him, and feels him tiredly recline behind her. She closes her eyes, and it is dark and quiet again.

 

Two years and eight months ago, Zak's dimly lit little apartment, the TV on and takeout boxes scattered all over the table in front of them while they were sitting on the couch. They'd ordered noodles and watched some boxing matches, but now the volume was turned down a little and Zak was walking to the store down the street to get ice or something or other that he was out of.

Kara's engagement ring, now new and unfamiliar to see on her hand, had been strangely distracting to him all night, and eventually when they got to talking about it he asked, "Why are you marrying him?"

She tilted her head to one side as she stared at him, and then gave a strange laugh and said, "What kind of a question is that?"

Lee only then realized how that must have sounded, even though he was sure his tone had been light enough. "Well, of course I'm not surprised you're planning to _in general_ ," he amended. "You've just never struck me as the kind to be very eager to get married soon. And it almost seems kind of fast."

Kara shrugged. "No, I guess I'm not the type to care much about getting married," she said, "but it's not like we're making a big deal out of it. It'll just be a small ceremony, nothing humiliating for me."

Lee laughed and said, "Yeah, I've been trying to picture you in a lacy white dress..."

She shook her head and laughed. "And you know, we were already planning to move in together anyway. I just thought...Why not? I know that he is...it."

Lee smirked. "I believe what most people say is 'the one.'"

Kara just snorted with laughter, leaned over to pick up a box of rice and started nibbling on it some more. He watched her a moment, then made himself stare past her and look at nothing in particular, just absorbing the colors from the framed sports posters on Zak's walls. Just a passive observer of his brother's life.

Maybe that gutsy little voice was with him a little even back then, much more hindered from expressing itself than now. He recalls how after a while, he stopped associating "Teller" with a professional Pyramid player and it just became an elusive word, a strange sound, how sometimes when it was said what he heard in his head was something like _Tell her_.

 

Kara wakes up a while after him and gets a heavy feeling in her stomach before she groggily rolls over to find him not in bed beside her. She just lies there a minute, surrendering to the dark flood of realizations and detailed recollections and trying to find the motivation to get up and face it all.

They were not nearly as drunk as she would like to think they were and she can remember just about everything very clearly. The feelings are all still vivid and stuck to her, like some jarring and irreversible physical change to her body, not slipped away into a blur. And she wonders for a second now, as she didn't at the time, how Lee was able to tell exactly where she hurt herself knocking against the bed frame when it was so dark she can hardly imagine he saw right where she hit it. Trying not to think too much about the feeling of his hands on her, in a pitch-black room during a storm in a hot and dark concert hall while he's standing behind her a breathing voice she could feel on the other end of a phone line, she absently brings one hand up to her shoulder and smoothes it down the length of her arm, curling her body inward a little.

She sighs heavily, lowering her face down toward the mattress so much some hair falls over her eyes. Then her face goes hard, ready and determined, and she sits up to get out of bed.

When she comes out into the next room, dressed but for missing her shirt, Lee is sitting on the couch and leaning over as he slowly and idly shuffles the playing cards on the table. He looks up at her and just says, "Hi." With just the short word he makes his voice very cautious and gentle, experimentally prodding. Not expecting too much.

She barely looks at him before she goes to the chair and sits in it, bending over to get her shoes and socks on the floor. "What time is it?" she asks.

In the few seconds of silence he waits before answering, Kara is first able to perceive his disappointment.

"About ten-thirty," he says.

She stands up and starts searching the room for her shirt.

"So," he says, not quite sounding angry, "you're just gonna run again, huh?"

Kara glances over at him, looks away and ignores the question as she keeps looking around. "Dammit," she mutters after a while. "Where's my...?"

When she turns again she finds him standing by her and holding out her shirt to her. She grabs it and says, "Thanks" without looking right at him, slipping it on over her head.

Before she can turn away from him again, he grabs her forearm to stop her. Then he just holds onto her, waiting, until she stops resisting and looks at him, meeting his eyes with a resigned look and swallowing. She knows she can't get out of giving him this much.

Lee is still very composed, but his voice starts to carry an edge of bitterness. "And what if I eventually get tired of having to catch up to you? You may not want to admit it but I think you're depending on that. You expect me to keep doing this forever?"

" _No_ , Lee, I expect you to finally do something that makes sense!" she says. "Start trying to make amends with your _real_ family, not me. Stay with your nice Aerilonese girl next door who will never be a difficult pain in the ass or embarrass you in front of people after drinking way too much. I mean, for _frak sakes_ , Lee, I tell you my last boyfriend ended up in a box because of me, and what do you do? You—you just keep showing up again, more _relentlessly_ than ever and won't stay away—"

"Not everybody only cares about protecting themselves at all costs. Gods, do I actually have to say it?" he says, grabbing her shoulders for a moment and saying it directly to her face with emphasis. " _I forgive you._ Is that so impossible for you to understand? To believe? Yeah, I know you were hoping that throwing that at me would be enough to get me out of your life for good. Thanks a lot. And I don't even want to think about what last night was supposed to be about. But that just shows how amazingly obtuse your guilt and self-hatred can make you. Tell me something. How did you become so frakking _terrified_ of being happy?"

Kara is shaking her head, her mouth in a small, dark grin. "So I'm just off the hook, just like that?" she says incredulously. "And just like that, now everything's fine and _we_ can be happy? It just doesn't make any difference to you what really happened to your brother?"

"That's not the frakking point and you know it," he says harshly. "How long are going to keep using _him_ as an excuse?"

In a heated instant her eyes go wide and her hand flies up to slap him hard across the face. Then in the following silence, they both just start to look a little sorry. Kara slowly turns away, disoriented for a moment before she remembers where her keys are on the kitchen counter and heads that way.

"Will you just...let me know the next time you're going to be home?" Lee asks.

Kara stops to turn on the faucet at the sink, filling her hands with water to take a drink and then quickly washing her face. "I don't think that's a good idea," she says flatly.

He comes over to her side as she turns to get her keys and puts them in her pocket. "Listen...We can forget this ever happened. I'm sure that's what you'll do anyway. Just tell me it won't be another two years before I so much as hear from you again."

She stops where she is, turned a little away from him. Something in her face falters for a moment and then she turns quickly to him, takes his face in her hands to pull him to her and kisses him forcefully, holding it for a long and very silent moment. Caught off guard, Lee can only react slowly, and he has just barely, lightly touched her waist when she lets go.

"Bye, Lee," she says quietly without looking directly at him, and then passes him to reach the door.

He stands there facing the way he was and doesn't watch her go, just sinking his head down a little when he hears the door shut behind her.

 

 _Do it._

"Why are you marrying him?" he asked. But this time, he imagines, it would not have been with a casual tone. Quietly, carrying some kind of serious meaning.

Kara would have just looked at him a long time without saying anything, her brow narrowing in confusion.

"It almost seems kind of soon to be getting married...Have you asked yourself why?"

Then she would have shook her head, said softly, "What the hell kind of a question is that?"

His face would not have completely hidden the almost sickening fear rising in his chest as his voice came out very uneasily. "Is it because you love him? Or is it because...you love him...and there's also the other one?"

He can see her looking away from him then, just staring across the room with wide eyes.

"And you know it just can't be otherwise, or you _think_ it can't, so you either have to keep both of them as you have them now or ruin everything and lose both, and that's why you're so sure you'll never want any of this to change and you're doing the right thing. Because you can't have me...but you can't lose me."

"What the frak do you think you're doing?" she might have just whispered then.

"Being honest...and a bastard. Believe me, I feel like a really terrible person right now, but I don't know what to do...Do you think this is going to get any _simpler_ when you're my sister-in-law?"

Neither of them had yet said the word "in-law" in reference to what they were going to become, and he imagines her visibly disturbed a little to hear it said out loud like that, closing her eyes a moment.

Past this he isn't sure what would have happened. He thinks after a while she probably would have said, not necessarily with anger, "I think you should leave," like something might happen otherwise, and then made some excuse for him having to take off when Zak came back.

After a couple days there would be a phone call. "It's me," his voice would come through after she picked up. No more code words. He would be able to tell just from her tense way of speaking that Zak must be with her and would make it short. A brief but sincere apology. "I just needed to say those things so I'd know" and "I think maybe we shouldn't see so much of each other anymore, when we can help it."

"Yeah" would be her small, cool voice, so very far away.

He can easily see it going this way, ending this way, if he had somehow summoned the courage to do it, the most difficult, ugly, unpleasant thing he ever would have had to do. After losing Zak, they would have parted in a much less bitter way, just with a somewhat cold goodbye. "Take care of yourself, Lee Adama" and "Yeah, you too." And doing the impossible by being able to say it would have been for nothing.

But he can also maybe see it happening differently. Maybe being faced with the sudden, unexpected reality of having to lose one of them, choose one, would have given her some kind of clarity she'd never had before. And ever since that phone call, she would find herself fiddling uneasily with the ring on her finger, knowing this is it, forever. And realize she couldn't do it.

Even if she didn't tell him what she knew now she really wanted, perhaps Zak always suspected, perhaps he would know why. And maybe he would have hated them for a while. However it happened it never would have been easy. But then three weeks later when he did his flight test, after having to do something as hard as disappointing him like that, failing him would not have been nearly as hard for Kara. And he could still be alive.

No matter how he imagines this, endlessly dwelling on it ever since Kara told him the truth that shook his whole world up at first, something about it still seems too easy and not quite possible. He's sure she probably couldn't even say now what her choice would have been. He knows it is just natural and human to be tormented by all the possibilities, how it could have been prevented. And he also knows that he may just want to find some comfort in the idea that they might not have been punished for what there was between them after all, after so much time of feeling this intense and stomach-turning guilt along with feeling its presence. But he is sure the memory of his brother will never stop sometimes making him think about it at least a little and wonder.

But in the end, he's not some god with control over fate and cause and effect, he can't completely understand it, and he doesn't know. He'll never know. As much as they can't help but still pick apart the possibilities and causes to try to find the one easy answer and reason as if that would make it all better, as if they or at least somebody has to pay and suffer and then there will finally be closure, they have to accept that.

 

Days pass at a labored, painstaking pace. After the first month since she last saw him, Kara starts to hear more and more about Lee from Bill as it seems they are becoming less and less the estranged father and son they used to be. She feels this might be partly thanks to her and this gives her some great relief she never expected she would ever have.

Lee has apparently stopped asking about her. This is a relief, too.

One time Bill says to her with apparent surprise, "You never mentioned you saw Lee that other time you were home. He told me you two got to catch up quite a bit."

She sits very still on the couch next to him, keeping her eyes on the television. "Um...I guess I assumed you'd already heard."

"So you're staying in touch with him now."

"No. Not really. I mean...what for?" she says casually. "If he gets married or something I'm sure I'll hear about it from you."

Bill laughs lightly, shaking his head. Then he notices President Adar's face on the television and disapprovingly takes the remote to change the channel right away, forgetting the subject and letting her relax a little.

The gray shirt Lee brought back to her all washed and neatly folded has sat with her shoes on the floor of her closet ever since then and never been worn since. She can't help feeling like he should never have given it back. It is too clean for her to touch now. She doesn't even know how to accept something like that, the blind and unconditional pardon it offers.

 

One night Lee is waiting for one of his friends from the _Poseidon_ to come over. He has been pointing out to him for weeks that he "never has fun anymore" as much as Lee keeps trying to convince him this isn't quite true, and even though most of the night is already gone he somehow found himself committed to going out with him tonight.

So he is very surprised after hearing a knock at his door and opening it to see someone else waiting there.

Kara leans against the doorway, giving a slow smile that promises no good. There is something unfamiliar and very disturbing in her eyes that seems to tell him already how this is going to go.

"Here," she says in a lazy voice, throwing him his red shirt which looks like it's been lying underneath something on her floor for months. "I didn't wash it."

She passes him and comes right inside before Lee has even been able to completely register what is going on. He watches her head toward the kitchen and just stays by the door, not shutting it behind her yet. All at once he realizes, only now, how angry he has been at her. Despite some of the last words he said to her, he suddenly feels like he can't do this all over again.

"Kara," he says stiffly as she goes to get into his cabinet. "What the frak are you doing here?"

"Hey, look," she says, finding the same ambrosia bottle they were drinking from the last time she was here, barely touched since then. "I don't know why you even buy this stuff."

He quickly shuts the door as she starts screwing off the cap from the bottle and goes over to her, stops her by pulling it away. "Dammit, Kara—I'm kind of expecting somebody," he says, starting to sound irritated.

She giggles stupidly, and Lee can conclude now that she has definitely already had a little to drink. "Well, whoever she is, I'm sure you can live without it for one night. I hear cold water is the trick," she adds with a snicker.

He angrily shakes his head, grabs her arm very hard and starts forcefully pulling her toward the door. "Hell with this," he says. "Obviously after a few drinks you can forget you've wanted nothing to do with me for three months."

He stops a few feet from the door when he hears another knock. "Great," he sighs, not looking forward to explaining this.

Kara has stopped smiling, looking away into the air with a somewhat dead expression, and she suddenly says quietly, "I talked to your father today."

Lee looks over at her, slowly understanding the meaning behind her words and then widening his eyes with shock. It all makes sense now, the beaten look in her eyes like something terrible has happened to her, why she would come to him...

They hear another knock, and Lee awkwardly looks toward the door for a moment. "Okay...okay," he just says, his voice much more soft now, touching Kara's back to turn her around and give her a push toward the couch. "Just...sit down. Hang on a minute."

She slowly starts heading toward the couch, stopping to turn and watch him as he goes outside into the hall to talk to his friend, leaving the door open a crack so that Kara can just faintly hear their soft speech. After sinking down into his couch, she sits leaning over with her arms crossed and just staring down at the table.

After telling his friend something to explain having to back out of their plans, Lee comes back in and shuts the door. Then he stops and meets eyes with her a moment as she looks up, both of them just looking pacified and regretful. Then he turns and goes back to his kitchen counter, opens a cabinet to get out one shot glass. Her face changes just a little into a light smirk as he brings it with the ambrosia bottle over to her and sits down next to her. Still not saying anything for a while, he pours a shot and slides it right in front of her, as if admitting she could probably use it right now.

Kara just stays very still, staring at the glass and not touching it. She shakes her head, her face starting to look devastated. " _Why_ did I tell him?" she says very softly. "I don't know what the hell made me...It was terrible."

"What happened?" he asks.

She draws in a long breath. "Well...I guess ever since you and him have gotten on better terms, he's been wondering what exactly brought on the change. Even though I know it wasn't just _that_ , of course...But you did tell him we saw each other last Mars Day weekend..."

"And he realized that must have had something to do with it," Lee assumes.

She nods, starting to look miserable again. "He starts saying, 'I don't know what you said to him to try to change things, but it means a lot to me' and telling me how much I've helped him as long as we've known each other just by being there, like the daughter he never had...Of course I couldn't frakking hide how bad it made me feel to hear all that and he started asking me what was wrong and saying, 'Every time I talk about Lee around you or you around him you both act like you're hiding something.' I know I should have just _lied_ , but I couldn't after he'd said those things, when he was looking at me like that...I'm sure _you're_ used to the way he looks at you like he knows everything. Gods dammit..."

She finally picks up the shot of ambrosia and quickly drinks it down. They both sit looking forward in silence for a while, and then Kara just gives a long sigh.

"And then he told me to get out," she finishes quietly.

After a while Lee has a sudden thought and asks, "Did you just _walk_ here?"

She nods. "Well...not from my place. I was at the park before. Just...sitting." She stops, thinking back on it, and then laughs a little. "I don't actually have any idea what I'm doing here. I just ended up...coming this way..."

He turns his head to look right at her and says quietly, "It's okay...I didn't really feel like doing anything with that guy anyway."

Kara smiles faintly. Then after a long moment of silence in which she seems to be summoning some kind of nerve, she starts speaking again, her tone reflective and thoughtful. "It was a really long time ago," she begins, making him look over at her again with some confusion. "I hadn't met you yet. Zak and I weren't even together yet, we'd just gone out for lunch or drinks a couple times after running into each other around the school. It was a year to the day since...well, anyway, it hadn't been a good day and I was in a really rotten mood..."

Lee almost wants to ask if she is talking about something that happened a year after her mother died, but something tells him interrupting her at all is going to break this extremely fragile moment of honesty, and he stays silent.

"So really late that night I was stupid and got in my car when I'd had too much to drink," she says. "Went for a few blocks before realizing I shouldn't be driving and then pulled over and just went to sleep there. Then a while later a cop showed up, and I had to make myself look as guilty as possible right away by giving him an attitude after he woke me up, and of course he took me in. I was short about a hundred cubits for what I needed for bail, and I had literally _no_ friends in town right then who I could have borrowed some money from...I couldn't think of anything more humiliating than calling one of my students. And I felt like I was taking advantage of him somehow. But I happened to have Zak's number written down with me and somehow I was sure he wouldn't tell anyone about it and I could trust him..."

Lee's face is filling with disbelief as he starts understanding. She looks to the side at him and smirks.

"When I called him, he just seemed to think it was kind of funny," she continues, and then smiles fondly as she remembers. "Got a little flirty with me on the phone, if you can believe it, joking about what a nice surprise it was to hear from me. As if it was absolutely nothing serious. And after that I couldn't believe how it just...didn't seem to make him feel differently about me. At all. Gods...I can't believe he _never_ even told you about this. When I mentioned the time I've been arrested, I kind of assumed..."

He smiles a little, shaking his head. "I guess he wasn't really as naive about it as it seemed," he says.

Kara looks forward again, still thinking back on the memory in detail, and then she shakes her head a little as her expression turns very sad. "He was just...such a _good person_..."

Lee's face takes on the same look as hers and then gives a sad smile. "I know."

"He deserved to have everything. Everything he wanted. Even if he wasn't qualified, all I could think was how frakking _unfair_ it was to...I just couldn't do it. I didn't think about what I was doing. I just _had_ to give that to him."

He looks straight at her now, speaking softly. "Kara. I know," he says again.

She turns her face to look in the opposite direction of him a moment, wiping at one of her eyes.

"Look at me," Lee says, and waits until she does. "You did it because you loved him. This didn't happen because you didn't love him enough. Or because we...deserved it somehow, or because I was a coward and joined the service instead of finding my own way and he was following my example when he was never really cut out for it. It was an accident. Okay?"

She shakes her head a little, smiling darkly. "It's easy to say it, huh?" she says.

He smiles back, an admission that it's not that simple. "Yeah, well...It's time one of us was at least able to say it."

Kara sighs, thinking a while, and then seems to struggle a moment to bring herself to speak again. "Are we okay?" she then asks softly.

This time when he smiles at her, it is very warmly, with a kind of final calm. "Sure. We're okay."

She grins a little, almost guiltily, and asks, "You sure you aren't still a little mad at me?"

He shrugs. "Maybe. I'm sure I'll get over it. It's not like I didn't...you know...have my own part in what happened, after all."

She grins again with a soft, almost nervous-sounding giggle.

Lee's face starts looking vaguely troubled, and then he says, "Just...let me know what to expect from you, okay? If you're going to take off and vanish without a trace again because that's what you have to do, _try_ to make sure you say goodbye."

She looks at him a long time, her eyes becoming a little sad again. Her voice coming out just faintly, she says slowly, "One day I'm going to hurt you so badly that you won't want to keep letting me come back."

The words do not completely pass him, sinking in as a briefly serious look in his eyes, but then he just smirks a little. "I don't think so. I've sort of learned my lesson now."

"I'm serious. That's what I _do._ "

"Well, I guess we'll just have to see," he says lightly.

She rolls her eyes a little, sighs heavily as a thought comes to her. "I have to go now," she says. "I've got a frakking dental appointment early tomorrow..."

He laughs a little, standing up along with her.

"Thanks for the drink," she says as she starts walking with tired reluctance toward the door, and he knows she means a lot more than that.

"Hey," he says, touching her shoulder, and she turns to face him again. He hesitates a little awkwardly for a second, then steps forward and pulls her into a hug. She accepts it easily, bringing her arms around him securely and closing her eyes, and he feels her breathing very deeply as if with great relief. There is the strong instant feeling of something locking tightly into place, a very heavy latch dropping.

"Don't worry about my dad," he says softly. "He'll forgive you. Just give him a while."

She gives a tiny nod with her face still buried tightly in his shoulder where it still fits so snugly. Then after a while he slides his hands down her arms a moment as he pulls away and goes to open the door for her.

Kara stops in front of him, feeling the need to say something more. "I'll...um..."

He just nods knowingly. "I'll see you around."

She smiles softly, nodding. "Yeah." Then leaves through the door, feels his eyes on her watching her leave down the hall as he keeps standing in the doorway a while, but just smiles to herself a little instead of turning and giving him a last look.

 

As long as Lee takes no risks, he ends up watching his life fall into a comfortable pattern and stay neatly folded into its confining and orderly shape. He is perfectly comfortable and healthy this way because this is the kind of person he is. He thinks, calculates, measures the practicality and chance of failure before making any move. And whenever she comes along again she always turns this safe order in which his life is arranged into a demolished wreckage, never failing to leave her mark that way. A stitched gash on his knee, pieces of a broken bottle with sharp edges like the angles of her body that feel so familiar to his hands in the dark, something he should know better than to touch if he wants to protect himself.

And yet he'll always keep letting her return through his door, because he knows with all the warnings she gave him about letting her come back the one thing she wasn't considering is that one day she might actually want to stay, and he hopes he isn't just unbelievably stupid for believing in her more than she does.

Because the sharp angles still fit too perfectly against his smoother ones, impossibly but undeniably, completing some not yet entirely beautiful but meaningful shape. Because after such a long time there is something detestable about the safety and order, the easy and mundane pattern, and even though he knows how it is probably always going to go, there is something about the reckless and destructive force she brings with her that feels like the only real breaths of air he gets in between the cold and clean spaces. After too long of missing it he will take it as long as she'll stay around before the moment she says, "I have to go now," and then all goes quiet again.


End file.
